10 ms·
Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes
- gcatalfamo 3y agoStarfield companions would've frown upon this solution. More seriously though: 10 years is a long time, this is super interesting but one would wonder if in such time other limiting dengue factors might've arose.
- fakecontent000 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gs17 3y agoI'm pretty sure this would be their preferred solution. They all get angry at you (and chastise you for not "trusting the science" because in the 23rd century, ecology is not considered science anymore?) for wanting to reintroduce the predator instead of spreading a microbe.
- rekttrader 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- henearkr 3y agoWolbachia is "healthy gut microbiota" but for mosquitoes. It prevents their infection by many viruses.
- smt88 3y agoIt seems that it shortens their lives, so it's not healthy for them.
- gehwartzen 3y agolong life riddled with parasites or somewhat shorter life sans parasites. I feel like they would be cool with it
- smt88 3y agoMosquitoes aren't affected by dengue. It's a human disease. Even if they were affected by it, they don't feel pain or have emotions, so they'd "choose" to live longer.
- lisper 3y agoThey would choose to live longer in the same sense that water chooses to flow downhill.
- Smoosh 3y ago> they don't feel pain Really? > We found “strong evidence” for pain experiences in adults of two orders, Diptera (flies and mosquitoes) and Blattodea (cockroaches and termites). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065280622000170 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652...
- smt88 3y agoReacting to harm is not the same as suffering. As far as we know, suffering requires nerves and cognition that mosquitoes don't have (not even close).
- deadbeeves 3y agoInsects have nervous systems. Nearly all animals do.
- firewolf34 3y agoThis Wolbachia bacteria is really something else. It seems to have a massive set of effects on a variety of organisms, directly impacting the way they reproduce, or even the way which sex they develop into. Remarkable. As some sort of bonus it also prevents the host from developing other viral diseases in the case of mosquitos, I guess because it's a parasite, so it's advantageous for it to do so? Wild little thing. Does a lot. >"Computational models predict that introducing Wolbachia strains into natural populations will reduce pathogen transmission and reduce overall disease burden.[64] An example includes a life-shortening Wolbachia that can be used to control dengue virus and malaria by eliminating the older insects that contain more parasites. Promoting the survival and reproduction of younger insects lessens selection pressure for evolution of resistance.[65][66]" >"In addition, some Wolbachia strains are able to directly reduce viral replication inside the insect. For dengue they include wAllbB and wMelPop with Aedes aegypti, wMel with Aedes albopictus.[67] and Aedes aegypti.[68]" [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia]
- a_bonobo 3y agoI absolutely love Wolbachia. I did some work with Wolbachia in theoretical biology a long, long time ago. They're usually only transmitted maternally and different strains came up with different strategies to maximise Wolbachia offspring: some strains prevent male offspring from developing, some strains prevent reproduction with Wolbachia-uninfected females so the infected males have only offspring with infected females! You can make models of Wolbachia population spread with these strategies forever and ever :)
- indigo0086 3y agoSo all benefits, no negatives?
- vGPU 3y agoI can’t help but feel like I’ve heard this before.
- bradleybuda 3y agoThe great thing about technology is that it's possible to have new things or ways of life that are strictly better than the ones they replace! We can move beyond the efficient frontier; progress is non-zero-sum. * Golden Rice * Unleaded gas * HCFCs (over CFCs) * etc
- ethanbond 3y agoYes it's possible, but we really need to be cautious. In general it's a bad idea to underestimate adaptive systems. It's especially foolish to underestimate the ultimate adaptive system: natural ecosystems. We should be extremely humble and careful when we're toying with the unfathomably complex system that we depend on. We understand very, very, very little about these things except that they're hard to predict and we really need them to continue working well enough to maintain the parameters we need for survival.
- dan-robertson 3y agoHow often do you hear about the downsides of malaria eradication in the United States (probably spraying most of Florida with DDT would be one…)? What about screwworm fly elimination in the United States and parts of Central America? That program is much more similar to the thing described in this article than spraying every puddle with insecticide.
- toast0 3y agoAfaik, DDT continues to be accepted for malarial mosquito control; DDT as an agricultural pesticide is what got a worldwide ban.
- somenameforme 3y agoI find these sort of things somewhat odd. Dengue is extremely unpleasant, but as the article mentions it has a 99.98% survival rate in spite of being predominantly spread in some of the most impoverished areas in the world. Wiki [1] gives even better figures than the article which yield a 99.99% survival rate, and a total hospitalization rate of 0.13%. Unforeseen consequences are a thing, and nature can evolve in difficult to predict ways. For instance one of the big early arguments for GMO crops is that it'd enable us to reduce our overall usage of herbicides. The main modification was glyphosate resistance, and since glyphosate was otherwise highly toxic to all plants, it was thought that just a bit of it would be enough to take care of what used to require much more herbicide. And it lived up to this promise at first. But nature responded by naturally evolving glyphosate resistant weeds, and farmers responded by just spraying more of it, and more regularly, and we're now using more herbicide/acre than ever before. In 1991 (just prior to GMO crops starting to really kick off), we were using a rate of 1.18 units of herbicide per acre. By 2000 that had declined to 1.06. "Now" (2014) we're up to 2.02 and rapidly increasing. [2] So many things (related to interacting with nature in various forms) seem to be being done under the assumption of a stationary target, when nature is anything but. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever [2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044953/
- foota 3y agoI believe conditions like this cause impact to people's livelihood by putting them out of action. Caring for the sick also has economic costs.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoIt causes massive economic impact! Where I live Aedes aegypti is extremely common and Chikungunya routinely causes people to miss work for over 6 months due to intense chronic pain. The impact on the public health care and social security systems is huge. These patients frequently need opioids on a daily basis because all other treatments failed.
- deleted 3y ago
- bedobi 3y agoThis is hardly the place for this kind of discussion but I can't help but comment on this. Countless species are already going extinct all the time, both known to us and completely unknown to us, and both "naturally" and from human impact, and no one really cares. Here's a rare case of a species that there is very good reason to deliberately get rid of, and suddenly people care and object, a lot!? Of course there's justifiable skepticism and a long, sorry history of unintended consequences of introducing, eradicating or in any way modifying a species or its behavior, but seriously, read up on it, this is not one of those species, pretty much everyone who knows anything about it (including otherwise very environmentally minded people who as a rule would never, ever agree with deliberately eradicating anything) agrees it can be eradicated with no meaningful impact on the ecosystem. (and yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing "because humans are bad for the environment" - while these mosquitoes do cause a lot of human deaths, the environmental "benefit" of those deaths are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things)
- Simon_ORourke 3y ago> yes, that includes even the armchair criticism from cynical misanthropes who consider human deaths resulting from this species a good thing If ever there was a species under no threat whatsoever it's those guys. I'm all for eradicate and move on, nature will be bound to throw something else at humanity so go for the small wins and to heck with it.
- somenameforme 3y agoIt's the means. If people wanted to look for ways to help reduce stagnant water, as a means of reducing mosquito populations, I suspect exactly 0 people would object. But releasing billions of mosquitos with a bacteria and hoping there's no natural evolution to it, and everything continues to work as planned indefinitely...? There's more than sufficient reason for skepticism there. Beyond this, I would also consider the arrogance of the present. When you look back at stupid decisions made in times past, it's not like they just blindly rushed into them (well not always at least). They certainly assessed them using the latest knowledge available at the time, and then moved forward after it was deemed safe and effective. It just turns out that we're quite frequently wrong on such assessments, and so things that fail in 'obvious' ways only look obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It's like how NASA can lose a half a billion dollar probe in modern times because nobody bothered to ensure that all systems were using the same unit systems. [1] Take yourself a decade in the future and imagine reading about these mosquitoes gaining, at the minimum, a resistance to the bacteria being used. Would it really surprise you? Or would you be thinking something more along the lines of, 'Wow, how could they not see that coming?' [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
- gnicholas 3y agoLos Angeles is doing something similar with fruit flies. [1] They're releasing infertile males, in the hopes that they outcompete males of a non-native species that could threaten the agricultural industry. 1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/millions-of-sterile-fruit-flies-will-soon-be-dropped-on-los-angeles-180983176/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/millions-of-steril...
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoThis is great news. Dengue was a constant problem in my home country of Malaysia, and remains a problem to this day. I still remember all the public education campaigns about it that I saw when I was young (random ads on TV about making sure there's no stagnant water, seeking medical help if you notice <symptoms>, etc), I'm very glad that there are easily implementable solutions to these problems. As a side note, I wonder why this kind of research is not more popular in university labs of tropical countries. Malaysia, Singapore, India, etc are home to plenty of university labs that should have the expertise and motivation to do this kind of thing, but they're really dropping the ball if they're not working on it right now. Every time I read about new mosquito fighting innovations it's out of an American or European lab, far away from where it's most impactful. Is it a problem of funding? Somehow the Malaysian government funds less mosquito disease research than the US? Political will? I would hope that the health ministries of tropical countries are willing to throw some money at the problem. Institutional knowledge? Plenty of the professors are educated in Australia/UK/US, so that can't be it. Coverage? Western media covers western labs, and don't notice when labs elsewhere do the same thing?
- melagonster 3y agoMalaysia, Singapore and Australia did experiment in field, there are not many countries accomplished this. so they did it.
- tim333 3y agoMaybe it's easier to be releasing them somewhere else? Oxford based Oxitec also have mosquitos to counter Dengue but genetically modified rather than with Wolbachia. https://www.wired.com/story/genetically-engineered-mosquitoes-population/ https://www.wired.com/story/genetically-engineered-mosquitoe...
- sohkamyung 3y agoHere are some links to research on using Wolbachia in Malaysia and Singapore: [1] Wolbachia Malaysia [ https://imr.nih.gov.my/wolbachia/ https://imr.nih.gov.my/wolbachia/ ] [2] Singapore NEA Wolbachia info [ https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/research/wolbachia-aedes-mosquito-suppression-strategy https://www.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/resources/researc... ] [3] A 2021 news article on Wolbachia in Malaysia [ https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/malaysia-fight-dengue-mosquitoes-wolbachia-2353636 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/malaysia-fight-dengue-m... ]
- hzay 3y agoCurrently down with dengue. Wish they'd put these good mosquitos where I live!
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y agoGet well soon! I've had a few friends catch dengue before.. doesn't sound like fun.
- KingMob 3y agoHope you get better. I knew a guy in Burma who nearly died of dengue.
- Fomite 3y agoNote that California has reported two cases of Dengue in people who haven't travelled outside the United States.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoAnd France recently one (of someone who never travelled outside of France).
- murphyslab 3y ago> The case remains under investigation, but it appears that someone became infected with the dengue virus, returned home and was bitten by a mosquito that passed it on to the local resident, according to Pasadena health officials. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/california-officials-confirm-2-cases-dengue-mosquito-borne-104592483 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/california-officials... It seems part of the common pattern for outbreaks of dengue viral infections in other urban centres. However California lacks a non-human primate reservoir would probably limit the risk of it becoming endemic.
- Fomite 3y agoMy personal favorite are the occasional cases of airport malaria.
- pkaye 3y agoThere have been cases in other states too over the last 10 years. Florida, Texas and Arizona had a lot more locally acquired cases. Those might have been the first locally acquired cases in California. Maybe with climate change, as it gets warmer it becomes more prevalent. https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/statistics-maps/historic-data.html https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/statistics-maps/historic-data.htm...
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- treme 3y agoI'd like to see something similar done for Tick bite/Lime disease and bed bugs, they both seem to be accelerating their reach past decade or so. What's the status on gene-drive approach to cull tail harmful insects?
- 3D30497420 3y agoThere's a really good Unsung Science podcast about a program related to this: https://wondery.com/shows/unsung-science/episode/12810-what-happened-to-the-mosquitoes-in-fresno/ https://wondery.com/shows/unsung-science/episode/12810-what-...
- martin82 3y agoSingapore has been doing this for years. When they release new males they put a flyer up at our lift that says "there's gonna be tons of mosquitoes soon, don't worry, they are males and they don't bite" and shortly after, all mosquitoes are gone. It seems to work. I'm not a fan of meddling with nature in this way, though. I have zero doubts that this will end up in some kind of unforeseen disaster.
- tetris11 3y agoN=1, there were a ton more frogs when I was a child, than now.